Taking Hannah to Utah--Voyageurs National Park (Superior, WI to Fargo, ND)

Oh man.  I did so NOT feel well when I woke up the morning after our late-night Culver's dinner.  But the show must go on, right?  We had a couple of hours to head to Voyageurs National Park.  Never heard of it? Yeah, neither had I.  Turns out, it's mostly a water park where people fish in both the summer and winter, and the visitor center side of it focuses on the people who have used the water over the past couple of hundred years.  We had a canoe ranger tour scheduled where we would learn things for an hour on land and then spend 30 minutes on the water.  About an hour before our scheduled tour, Hannah got a phone call (unbelievable in and of itself because we basically hadn't had any service for the past two days).  The tour was cancelled because of the rain and the water conditions on the lake.  Hannah was so disappointed.  We headed to the visitor center anyway.

Bless the hearts of those rangers because they had set up the configuration of the canoe with chairs in the front of the room, and after the presentation had started, the ranger asked for a volunteer.  Hannah had no problem at all raising her hand.  She then proceeded to don all of the accoutrements that a voyageur of French Canada would have worn, bringing his pelts from central Canada down to the St. Lawrence waterway for purchase. 

 

Yep, the entire park is based on those men who facilitated the fur trade (specifically beaver fur).  It felt a bit like an oxymoron to base a park on what the park system stands against now, but they frame it as celebrating history.  (I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually either dismantle the park, or rename it.)  It was incredible to hear what the voyageurs endured to get the pelts down the water ways, but it was a bit sickening to think of how the men decimated the population of so many animals.  Currently, the population of beavers is 15 million (they have made a comeback) whereas there were 30 million 200 years ago.  Crazy.

Hannah donned her tuque and her sash and bands around her calves to keep the leeches out of her pants ;-) The voyageurs sang to keep the rhythm of rowing, so we did as well.  We learned about their birch bark boats too which were light but not always water-tight.  And during the presentation, we could hear the wind and rain pummeling the visitor center....which made me very thankful to be pretend voyageurs inside.

We really did get as much as we could out of the presentation and then headed down to another visitor center (the park has three) so that Hannah could complete her junior ranger packet.  While there, we
discovered that an older ranger was a SCUBA diver so it was fun to swap some stories with him.  She took her junior ranger pledge.

After that, we drove to Fargo, North Dakota, a new state for both of us! We could hardly believe the difference once we hit the state line.  It was like we returned to civilization.  We decided on Chipotle for dinner, but made a pit stop at a cupcake store...because what is a Mommy/Hannah trip without cupcakes in tow?